Hard drive issue, can see on Bios but not on windows

Enekuda

Commendable
Sep 18, 2016
1
0
1,510
OK so i recently built myself a computer, mostly for my side business of vinyl decals for a worldwide car group and some occasional gaming.

On this PC i have 2 drives, a 180GB boot drive and a Western Digital 1TB. the 180GB holds my system files and program files. the WD 1TB holds all the documents and whatnot. I recently found an external hard drive that i used to use forever ago, a Western Digital 2TB drive, that i had lost the power plug for.

I read online i could take the drive out and throw it into my new computer and retrieve the files from it (as i have no clue what i had on it i wanted to make sure there wasn't any memories id be wiping by formatting it right off the bat)

This is when the problems started.....

as soon as i plugged it in and booted the computer the main "Gigabyte Motherboards" loading screen just sat FOREVER, probably 5 minutes (usually its about 3 seconds) until finally i hard shut down the computer and disconnected the drive.

then when i rebooted it took much longer than normal and when it finally booted my 1TB drive was gone from windows.

I rebooted into Bios and can see that it is still listed in bios, no issues i could see in there, but when i get to windows it is no longer there. i have checked disk management too and still not showing up.

Ive been researching options on trying to maybe recover the data on the drive as i believe it is a logical error not a physical error (no noises or other issues i can see from outside, the drive itself is only maybe 3 months old, though i know it doesn't save it from having an issue) Ive swapped STAT cables and power cables to the drive with no luck either.

occasionally it will give me issues with booting too where it wants to repair my windows installation as well, but all the options are either requiring a format of the drive or don't help the issue. eventually it will let me boot to windows.

scanned for malware and virus's...also no luck.

Any one had this issue or could recommend something for me to try before i spend big bucks on something to recover the data, and any suggestions on data recovery software would be very helpful. i have done a lot of browsing on this site before posting this too but either it hasn't helped or isn't the exact issue i am having.

Thanks in advance!
 
Solution
I would guess that the drives are fine, it's just a Windows seizure. The important first issue is to save your data.

One simple way to get at the contents of the drive is to boot from a Linux Live USB stick and mount the drive and another drive to copy the data to.

I prefer Mint personally, but it is a simple process and the USB boot stick will not write anything to your OS drive. Just download the free UNetbootin tool and select Mint 32 bit. Let it automatically make the stick and then boot from the stick, simply click on the drive to mount it and view the contents.

They can be copied to other mounted devices by drag and drop.

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
I would guess that the drives are fine, it's just a Windows seizure. The important first issue is to save your data.

One simple way to get at the contents of the drive is to boot from a Linux Live USB stick and mount the drive and another drive to copy the data to.

I prefer Mint personally, but it is a simple process and the USB boot stick will not write anything to your OS drive. Just download the free UNetbootin tool and select Mint 32 bit. Let it automatically make the stick and then boot from the stick, simply click on the drive to mount it and view the contents.

They can be copied to other mounted devices by drag and drop.
 
Solution